Besides endless reviews (not only for the Daily Chronicle) and further country books, such as The Heart of England (1906) and The South Country, he also produced essays, anthologies, guidebooks, and folk-tales. He had to visit London to solicit commissions, mostly ill-paid, and to do research. The countryside around Steep influenced Thomas's poetic landscapes.ĭuring these years Thomas often saw himself as ' a doomed hack' ( Letters to Gordon Bottomley). ( Myfanwy Thomas was born in 1910.) Their most significant move was to Petersfield, Hampshire (1906), and particularly (from August 1913) to Yew Tree Cottage, Steep, near Petersfield. From 1902, when their daughter Bronwen was born, to 1913 the Thomases moved house five times. He mainly reviewed contemporary poetry, reprints, criticism, and country books. Despite succeeding Lionel Johnson as a regular reviewer for the Daily Chronicle, he was earning less than £2 a week. His dependence on reviewing caused a conflict between necessity and creativity. In 1901 Thomas and his family moved to Rose Acre Cottage at Bearsted, near Maidstone, Kent. He graduated with a second-class degree in history (1900) this disappointed his father, as did Thomas's decision to become a writer. In March 1898 Thomas, having matriculated at Oxford as a non-collegiate student (1897), had won a scholarship to Lincoln College. When they married on 20 June 1899 Helen was pregnant with their son Merfyn, who was born in January 1900. … His hands were large and powerful and he could do anything with them'. The eyes were grey and dreamy and meditative. She describes Edward as tall and fair: ' His nose was long and straight, his mouth very sensitive. In her memoirs As it was (1926) and World without End (1931) Helen Thomas records the problems caused by her father's death in 1896, the lovers' youth, and her mother's hostility to her relationship with Edward Thomas. He had also begun a relationship with Noble's second daughter, Helen Berenice Noble (1877–1967). Encouraged by the critic James Ashcroft Noble and influenced by Jefferies, he was already publishing essays based on his long country walks and assembling his first book, The Woodland Life (1896). He reacted against the worldly values of his father, who was locally prominent in Liberal politics. After leaving St Paul's in 1895, he studied for the civil service examination, but this expressed his father's ambition rather than his own. Thomas was educated at several schools, including Battersea grammar school and St Paul's, London, where he disliked the competitive atmosphere. His alienation from Christianity also began in childhood. Thomas's interest in nature had been fostered by his family's move to the area in London between Clapham and Wandsworth commons, but he usually represents the city as alien, the country as his imaginative ground. His autobiography, The Childhood of Edward Thomas (1938), evokes holidays in Wales and in Wiltshire, where he explored the landscape of Richard Jefferies, his first literary hero, and met ‘Dad’ Uzzell, a model for the old countrymen who are a touchstone in his work. In The South Country (1909) Edward Thomas calls himself ' mainly Welsh', though some family names (including Eastaway, which he was to use as a pseudonym) have links with western England. 1855), daughter of William Henry Townsend, master mariner, of Newport, Monmouthshire. Thomas, (Philip) Edward ( 1878–1917), poet and writer, was born on 3 March 1878 at 10 Upper Lansdowne Road North, Lambeth, London, the eldest of the six sons of Philip Henry Thomas (1854–1920), staff clerk for light railways and tramways at the Board of Trade, and Mary Elizabeth Townsend ( b.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |